Barriers and Facilitators Influencing Arab Muslim Immigrant and Refugee Women's Breast Cancer Screening: A Narrative Review.
Louise Racine, Isil Isik Andsoy
PMID 35473467WHAT IT FOUND
Arab Muslim immigrant and refugee women often avoided breast cancer screening because of language barriers, shame, fatalism, fear, and resettlement demands.
Female, Arabic-speaking providers, interpreters, reminders, and mosque-based education were reported to help.
Key findings
01Barriers to screening were grouped into individual factors, health care system and provider factors, and cultural factors.
02Female or Arabic-speaking providers and appointment reminders were reported facilitators.
03Interventions with attention to gender and language were reported to decrease breast cancer inequities among Arab American immigrant women and Bosnian and Somali Muslim refugee women.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Only English-language studies were searched, so views of women who read or speak other languages may be missing. Most included studies relied on women's own reports of screening, which can be inaccurate or biased. Several studies treated Arab Muslim immigrants and refugees as one group, which hid refugee-specific needs. The review used narrative synthesis rather than statistical pooling, so it cannot rank interventions by effect size. The included studies were mostly from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, so transferability to other resettlement contexts is limited.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. Funding was provided by Sigma Theta Tau International and the Canadian Nurses' Foundation to the first author, and by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey to the second author.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that a specific cultural intervention will increase screening rates. The review mostly reports perceptions and self-reported screening, and it does not compare interventions directly. Also, do not assume all Arab Muslim immigrant and refugee women share the same beliefs; several studies collapsed immigrants and refugees into one category.